Obama and energy: Reality demolishes rhetoric

When it comes to energy, the gap between what President Barack Obama says and what his administration has done is immense.

In Tuesday night’s debate, the president depicted his policies as pragmatic and intended to broadly diversify all sources of energy. In fact, the Obama administration’s actions reflect the clichés and assumptions of the faculty lounge: Don’t allow new oil and gas exploration on public lands because fossil fuels are evil; no matter how much in ongoing subsidies that taxpayers have to pay, renewable energy is always superior; and, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu memorably said in 2008 before he took office, America would benefit from having gasoline prices like Europe’s – i.e., $10 a gallon.

Now, even as the president asserts he’s desperate to bring down gas prices, Chu has said that’s not the Energy Department’s job. Instead, he told Congress in March that his priority was reducing America’s dependence on oil. In past decades, that was understood as a reference to our reliance on oil supplied by hostile nations. But not with this administration. Instead, the president wants to end our dependence on oil – even if it comes from cheap, newly available American supplies.

Which brings us to the phenomenal turn of events since Obama took office in January 2009. He showered tens of billions of dollars on a great variety of alternative-energy projects with the stated goal of creating a green-energy revolution. But the revolution we got has been with “brown” energy on private land. As The New York Times noted in April, we are on the brink of an era of “cheap and abundant” domestic natural gas and oil because of remarkable advances in drilling technology. What was the only potential obstacle to this happening cited by the Times? Objections from environmentalists that would prevent further use of newly improved versions of “fracking” – the use of high-powered blasts of water to free up supplies locked in shale rock.

Which brings us to California, where “fracking” – were it pursued with 10 percent of the enthusiasm seen in North Dakota or Ohio – could be a gigantic economic godsend. On Tuesday, several environmental groups filed suit against the state government for allowing fracking. But fracking has been around for decades in the heavily regulated energy drilling business. Why claim environmental peril now after fracking has been used to develop 1 million oil and gas wells? Most likely because it’s suddenly become much more efficient – and the last thing greens want is “cheap and abundant” fossil fuels.

Even if cheaper energy could create millions of new jobs in manufacturing and sharply boost our broader economy. Even if it could dramatically improve our national security by ending our energy reliance on hostile foreign powers.

A pragmatic environmental movement – and a pragmatic president – would accept that fossil fuels are here for a very long time to come and seek to do the maximum possible to limit their negative environmental impacts. But such pragmatism is not possible when the movement is akin to a religion built on the idea that fossil fuels are evil – and a true believer sits in the Oval Office.